The State of Linux in 2016

As side projects go, few have succeeded quite as spectacularly as Linus Torvald’s attempt to create a new, free operating system. In 1991, he termed his project kernel “Freax,” a name soon eclipsed by another: “Linux.”

In the past twenty-five years, Linux has grown and grown (and grown), overcoming resistance and legal threats from Microsoft and other proprietary-software vendors. Between 2005 and 2015, more than 12,000 developers contributed to the Linux kernel, committing changes at a rate of 8 per second.